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Apparently, my wife was perusing our Ward’s website area and found I have 18 home teaching families assigned to me. No companion. A couple with cancer, lots of less actives, some with personality disorders. No one has asked me if I want to take this assignment, particularly in this volume. I haven’t been spoken to about these yet, but based on my ever-evolving leadership philosophy, I can’t say I’m too pleased with the idea. My approach to leadership now is born of reading some first class books like the Art of Leadership, Leadership Jazz, Leading without Power, and 22 years of studying, practicing and teaching management and leadership in volunteer contexts. Plus healthy doses of repeated non-successes in delegation/leadership in the church (along with some good successes).
I feel this is a violation of a few principles:
1. If you want someone to do something, make sure you wait for an answer. (Translation — ask people what they are willing to do out of respect for their agency). No one asked me if I want to do this in this volume.
2. Aligning delegation with talent. Anyone who knows me at church seems me as lukewarm, not a TR-holder, not fully active, although present. Am I really the person to assign 18 home teaching families without my input or permission?
3. Getting to know the Sheep before you put them to work. No one has made that attempt. I’m sure there has been gossip in meetings where people give watered down versions of me, but no direct conversation with our HP leadership.
Anyway, perhaps this is recent and they just haven’t hunted me down and asked me to do HT again. I haven’t been out for about 4 years due to our leaving the Ward due to bullying of my daughter. We moved back about a year ago, and I’ve been left alone. I guess it’s about time. Perhaps they will approach me at some point.
My first line of attack is to do nothing. I haven’t been approach so I’m not going to encourage it.
Any thoughts on the best way to handle the situation when they hand me my list? I can see it coming.
My inclination is to simply see as many families I feel fits my life. My son is supposed to get the priesthood at some point, so I will take him to one or maybe two families to fulfull the “Watchman in Israel” mandate
The part I don’t like is phone calls from the HP leadership and the other 16 families on the list when there is a sporadic need. I am not in a place where I can just drop stuff anymore and be available on a moment’s notice, like I was used to doing in my more active days. And frankly, my heart isn’t into that kind of service for the time being.
Thoughts on how to proceed when/if they approach me with the list? It have a feeling it’s coming.
I am HT companions with the former EQP. When he was EQP it would go like this. He would ask what my schedule was like a few days before the end of the month. I would be busy but would offer a few days in the early part of next month. He would say that he needed to check his schedule and get back to me. Sometimes that would be the end of it until the final few days of the next month. When we did agree on a day when we were both available he would ask me to set up the appointments. Of the five or so families we had assigned we might get 3 that were able and willing to receive us in their home. All in all we would get out about once a quarter.
In the year since my companion has been released as EQP we have been out once. Same scenario – longer timeline.
I would just ignore it.
18 families. That sounds excessive/strange. Does lds.org include home teaching assignments somewhere? I’m wondering how your wife found out that information. Did she see it in MLS? If so I wouldn’t read much into it.
Back in the day (it’s been years since I’ve used it) MLS complained when there were families in the system that were not assigned home teachers. In my experience EQPs/HPGLs usually assigned all the families that they didn’t want to assign to a HT companionship to themselves. Families that no one knew, families that did not want to receive visits, families that were known to have moved out of the ward but no one knew where to send the records, etc. because the HT assignment
hadto be made to someone and the EQP knew which people to “ignore” on their list. Maybe they did that with you? Assigned you to a HT route to tick that box, then dumped all the people that they don’t intend to have home taught into your companionship because… they gotta be assigned to someone (and they don’t want to bring down
theirstats 
I wouldn’t worry about it until they handed me a little piece of paper during opening exercises. Or in this case, a scroll large enough to accommodate 18 families.
:crazy: If they did, and it had 18 families on it, I’d give my best Edna Krabappel impersonation, and it would be involuntary. HA!To answer your question, Nib, I haven’t been handed a list, or sat down with a leader who initiated talk about home teaching yet. My wife has access to an admin area or something in our local Ward’s LDS org area since she’s a ward leader. She told me about it. She read the names and counted the fams as she scrolled through it all on her phone. At one time, my sense of responsibility would not allow me to shirk any responsibility handed to me. Now that I’ve grown, and progressed, ignoring such responsibility until such time I agree to it seems like a worthy choice. How I have progressed in my mortal probation
😆 😆 😆 Actually, now that I feel they are violating the principles of leadership I have learned in my own, independent study (and out of the best books), I think I will be able to turn my sense of personal responsibility “off”. I will not let the inexperience or authoritarianism of leaders in what I feel is sometimes, a thankless, egocentric organization, disturb my peace and happiness.
As you can see, I’m struggling with that right now. Again — my mantra — does this bring me joy? No it does not, so ignore it, shed, it, and cast it off.
My guess was that I don’t think it’s an actual assignment. They just used you to create a companionship in the system where they could stick all the no contact people and the we can’t find them people to fulfill an everyone has a HT requirement in the system. nibbler wrote:
My guess was that I don’t think it’s an actual assignment. They just used you to create a companionship in the system where they could stick all the no contact people and the we can’t find them people to fulfill an everyone has a HT requirement in the system.
That’s a wonderful “Welcome Back” present!
They might be just making sure I don’t appear on the list of people not assigned to be a home teacher, while parking some of the people who don’t want home teachers etcetera.
They put the existing HPGL on the list who has cancer. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy you put on a parking list though…who knows. Until they talk to me it’s as if there is no assignment…and then what…I’m telling you I won’t be accountable for 18 families that is for sure.
SilentDawning wrote:
…I haven’t been handed a list, or sat down with a leader who initiated talk about home teaching yet.…At one time, my sense of responsibility would not allow me to shirk any responsibility handed to me. Now that I’ve grown, and progressed, ignoring such responsibility until such time I agree to it seems like a worthy choice. How I have progressed in my mortal probation
Actually, now that I feel they are violating the principles of leadership I have learned in my own, independent study (and out of the best books), I think I will be able to turn my sense of personal responsibility “off”. I will not let the inexperience or authoritarianism of leaders in what I feel is sometimes, a thankless, egocentric organization, disturb my peace and happiness.
As you can see, I’m struggling with that right now. Again — my mantra — does this bring me joy? No it does not, so ignore it, shed, it, and cast it off.
SD, for what it’s worth, this is progress. You are my new inspiration.
I wouldn’t worry about it unless they talk to you about it. In our stake some wards (mine included) do have many long term inactives assigned to a few people with the idea that they do some sort of annual contact. I have some, I send them a Christmas card and they count as home taught the fourth quarter of each year. Others do it differently, but it is usually just a short note (“if you need something let me know”), sometimes a phone call, rarely a visit ( sometimes the bishopric, EQP or HPGL, or missionaries, visit them). The thing about that is, we know that we’re assigned to them and what the expectation is. There are also some that are “quarterly visits” for one reason or another (I don’t have any of those) and they count as visited each month of the quarter if visited once during the quarter, and sometimes a phone call or email counts there as well. Our stake also has a guideline that each companionship be assigned no more than 4 or 5 families that actually should be visited monthly. All that said, our home teaching percentage still hovers around 20%.
If nobody has talked with you about it, it isn’t an assignment. Period. If someone does, I would suggest a letter writing route as your response. My wife’s VT assignment is just that. She writes a generic, short letter each month and mails it. If they won’t accept that, simply tell them you can’t commit to visiting that many people without hurting your family. It isn’t true, and there is no adequate objection they can make.
However, it isn’t an assignment right now, so I would ignore it. No need to waste time and emotional capital on what isn’t real right now.
Quote:SD, for what it’s worth, this is progress. You are my new inspiration.
Thanks Minyan — appreciate that very much.
And thanks Ray – I’m not losing sleep over it, but love to come to this community to reflect before something hits — so I am prepared. I can’t go on month after month expecting NOT to be approached about HT< particularly if I have agreed to ordain my son to the priesthood. How can you ordain someone to an office that involves the program, and yet not do it yourself? At the same time, I am on the joy principle. The question is, how can Hometeaching bring me joy? I see value in teaching my son the value of getting outside his life and into the lives of others. I would actually like giving practical help to someone in our Ward who needs it, with my son in tow, learning the value of service with his Dad. As you know, I put in a lot of hours in service right now, and have done for 5 years outside the church. I would like to pass that on to my boy. I think I would enjoy taking him into the lives of people who have a much different life than he does, to broaden his perspective. I can see myself a) requesting they put 16 families onto a different list b) give me two who want to see us and c) get my son involved. I could do that. it would bring me joy. I would have messages that are life-oriented, and that speak to both the person being home taught and my son at the same time. I would love for him to remember when his Dad used to take him to visit other people with needs. Letter writing — no — I still have a bad taste in my mouth when I funded letters to families in the HPG we could not see. Bishop acknowledged they made a difference, but then refused to fund them after I asked for money. At the time I was also paying tithng and fast offerings, so it seemed like an unwarranted burden to go on for years and years. It cost me about $50 a month for two years on top of tithing a fast offering. After he declined the funding, I continued paying for it, and then found at the end of the year he sent unspent budget money back to the Salt Lake. Never again. I call that a form of leadership abuse. In this case, the guy was a 3 time Bishop, former Major in the military, and a senior manager at a company you would recognize. He was not without talent. So, I find that mistake on his part hard to forget in situations like these.
My money is on clerical error. There’s nothing wrong with approaching priesthood leaders about it. “Hey, my wife noticed that the system has me assigned as home teacher to 18 families. What’s up with that?” In that same conversation, you can let them know what you want to do. When I was HPGL, I would have loved to hear that someone in the group wanted a service-oriented assignment, for two reasons. First, it was always a chore to figure out who to assign to whom, so having some external guidance would have been nice. Second, I always worried about overloading people with demanding assignments, so knowing who was willing and able to take them on would have been nice.
Eighteen is ridiculous. I haven’t even got a third of that and half of them we don’t visit as they are inactive.
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